Free Fiction River: Moonscapes by Fiction River

suffered terribly from loneliness and boredom. She would spend entire days writing angry screeds to the prison panel for this cruel punishment. Getting no response, she turned to dictating novels where she could easily kill off the Popess, the judges, the citizen jurors, and anyone else she cared to control in her fantasy world. When she had finally bled all her anger into the stories, she stopped writing and took to voracious reading. Over a million volumes were stored for her, ranging from light love stories to complex family sagas, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies and tragedies. Even science fiction could keep her going on her worst days. Now that she was no longer a threat to Earth, she had access to thousands of banned books. Her soul already doomed to hell, the Popess and her minions no longer tried to save her from her wayward thoughts.
    She was allowed written communication with the Earth-Research administration, where some low-level lacky would decide whether to send her missive off to the addressee. In the first year, her mother wrote weekly. Carrie hated how the greeting was always to “The Prisoner of Charon.” Even her own mother refused to call her by her given name. In the second year, her mother stopped writing. She wasn’t sure if her family had moved or if the administrator wasn’t passing along her messages. By the third year, she accepted she was completely alone.
    In the third year, Carrie tried to kill herself by not eating. After all, being sent to the far reaches of the solar system was worse than a death sentence. Her punishment was to live entirely alone for the rest of her days.
    Her starvation was not successful. Once she slipped into unconsciousness, the bots fed her and brought her back to health. To ensure she didn’t try it again, she was now not only confined within the pod, but to her small two foot by six foot bed. Yet another indignity visited upon The Prisoner of Charon. One could not choose to die.
    Carrie had little memory of what happened in the fourth or fifth years of her journey. As the pod passed each planet, she was briefly introduced to the prisoners of various moons. When she passed Saturn and Jupiter, the list went on forever, with over one hundred prisoners between them. Then Uranus with thirty-two prisoners. She learned that all the scientific studies of the various moons and satellites in the solar system were performed by prisoners sentenced to living alone in a pod orbiting around one moon. At first she had welcomed the brief contact of human voices on her journey, but as she listened to their loneliness, their helplessness, she decided she would prefer not to be introduced. She had enough of her own baggage to carry.
    By the sixth year, Carrie was merely going through the motions of living. She had accepted her confinement to the pod, but being restrained in her bed was so demoralizing that she could no longer pretend interest. She missed standing, and bending, and on occasion dancing. The bots’ stimulation of muscles kept her in shape but it was not the same. If it weren’t for her diary entries she would have nothing to prove she actually was conscious during those years. Perhaps it was better she didn’t remember. One day flowed into the next. Without movement or the will to improve her mind she relied on the bots to control all intake, and quickly remove all eliminations with the same efficiency.
    When the pod passed Neptune and entered the final year of her journey, Carrie gave up writing in her diary and renewed hope for meaningful work to come. She studied music and poetry. She learned to compose music to match her mood by sampling the ancient symphonies that were supplied via the pod’s computer. She now had saved several new symphonies she’d designed from the inspiration of poetry or classic plays she favored. A favorite was a pastoral piece with some operatic notes and loosely based on Aristophanes Greek comedy, The Frogs . Given that Carrie’s